Community Engagement
Held a working meeting to review and note updates to the Geoportal tutorials.
July 2025 Program Update
Introducing Our New Strategic Technology Plan
Section titled “Introducing Our New Strategic Technology Plan”As the BTAA Geoportal continues to grow, so do the demands on our technology. With the recent expansion of the Big Ten and the addition of new geospatial resources from the West Coast, we saw an opportunity to pursue a more modern and flexible approach to managing our collections. The result is a Strategic Technology Plan for building a stack that is modular, resilient, and future-ready.
The centerpiece of this new approach is a central metadata API that will make it simpler to access and reuse our geospatial records. The API will support multiple discovery portals and access points, and it already powers a QGIS discovery plugin that is in active development.
We are moving away from a single, monolithic geoportal application toward a modular framework built on open-source Python tools. This structure lets us update individual components more easily and empowers us to prioritize data over tools, collaborate across institutions, and build infrastructure that adapts as our needs evolve.
Our 2025-26 roadmap outlines four projects that bring this plan to life. Development is underway with a full rollout targeted for mid-2026, and we look forward to sharing updates along the way.
Program Activities
Section titled “Program Activities”Committees
Section titled “Committees”Coordination
The July Coordinating Committee and Program Team meetings were canceled due to vacations.
Knowledge
Did not meet; all committee work wrapped in June.
TECHnology
Did not meet; all committee work wrapped in June.
Workgroups
Section titled “Workgroups”
Geodata Collection Workgroup
Section titled “Geodata Collection Workgroup”- Aligned on the Urban Base Layers initiative, identifying seven foundational city-scale datasets shared across major metro areas in Big Ten states.
- Confirmed Minneapolis as the first data provider partner to approach, paving the way for collaboration with additional cities.
Service Model Collaboration Workgroup
Section titled “Service Model Collaboration Workgroup”- Continued asynchronous work on the final report to finalize it for the August Program Team meeting.
Geospatial Data Citation Workgroup
Section titled “Geospatial Data Citation Workgroup”Did not meet.
BTAA Geoportal
Section titled “BTAA Geoportal”This Month by the Numbers
Section titled “This Month by the Numbers”Top Google searches leading to the Geoportal
Section titled “Top Google searches leading to the Geoportal”- kuwait sex
- btaa geoportal
- sanborn maps
- oakland county mi parcel search
- franklin county ohio school district map
- franklin county line map
- fire insurance maps california
- geoportal
- purdue campus map
- oakland county parcel viewer
- nj wetlands map
Top internal keyword searches
Section titled “Top internal keyword searches”- PLSS
- Geology
- Sanborn
- ArcGIS hubs
- Address
- Parks
- Parcel
- La Habra
- Turkey
- Puerto Rico
Collections
Section titled “Collections”Total records as of August 1, 2025: 107,805
Harvesting Activities
Section titled “Harvesting Activities”| Title | Records Added | Records Retired |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-07-01 Scan ArcGIS Hubs | 92 | 108 |
| 2025-07-22 Scan ArcGIS Hubs | 53 | 109 |
| edu.wisc new WI DOT scanned maps | 42 | 0 |
| PASDA 08a-01 Q3 2025 | 10 | 0 |
| Add multiple ArcGIS Hubs for cities | 8 | 0 |
| Harvest records for new city ArcGIS Hubs | 967 | 0 |
| MN GeoCommons 05a-01 July 2025 | 2 | 0 |
| CKAN scan Q3 2025 | 0 | 0 |
| Socrata Harvest Q3 2025 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 1,174 | 217 |
Web Development
Section titled “Web Development”- Strengthened Geoportal stability and performance. Implemented a bot mitigation solution using Cloudflare Turnstile and Samvera tools to stabilize uptime during disruptive traffic spikes.
- Advanced OpenGeoMetadata API development. Published a draft specification for a new geospatial API that supports BTAA and broader discovery efforts, laying groundwork for broader adoption.
- Explored budget-friendly hosting solutions. Tested Kamal deployment on a low-cost physical server as a promising option for hosting the GeoData API with minimal overhead.